Competitive Swarm Optimized SVD Clutter Filtering for Ultrafast Power Doppler Imaging

IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2024 Apr;71(4):459-473. doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2024.3362967. Epub 2024 Mar 28.

Abstract

Ultrafast power Doppler imaging (uPDI) can significantly increase the sensitivity of resolving small vascular paths in ultrasound. While clutter filtering is a fundamental and essential method to realize uPDI, it commonly uses singular value decomposition (SVD) to suppress clutter signals and noise. However, current SVD-based clutter filters using two cutoffs cannot ensure sufficient separation of tissue, blood, and noise in uPDI. This article proposes a new competitive swarm-optimized SVD clutter filter to improve the quality of uPDI. Specifically, without using two cutoffs, such a new filter introduces competitive swarm optimization (CSO) to search for the counterparts of blood signals in each singular value. We validate the CSO-SVD clutter filter on public in vivo datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve higher contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and blood-to-clutter ratio (BCR) than the state-of-the-art SVD-based clutter filters, showing a better balance between suppressing clutter signals and preserving blood signals. Particularly, our CSO-SVD clutter filter improves CNR by 0.99 ± 0.08 dB, SNR by 0.79 ± 0.08 dB, and BCR by 1.95 ± 0.03 dB when comparing a spatial-similarity-based SVD clutter filter in the in vivo dataset of rat brain bolus.

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Blood Flow Velocity
  • Phantoms, Imaging
  • Rats
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted*
  • Ultrasonography / methods
  • Ultrasonography, Doppler* / methods